The Four Body Problem
by BobH2
Summary: Lucy Prince was the wife of best-selling horror novelist Greg Prince. When three identical copies of her show up - one living, two dead, and one of the latter clearly murdered - it's obviously a case for Mulder and Scully.
1. Chapter 1

FBI TRAINING FACILITY,  
>QUANTICO, VIRGINIA.<p>

With her usual methodical efficiency, FBI agent Dr Dana Scully had carried out a full post mortem examination of the two bodies that had been shipped to the morgue here at Quantico. Her partner, FBI agent Fox Mulder, had asked her to do the autopsies so he clearly thought there was something out of the ordinary here, something worthy of being an X-file, but she hadn't found anything weird. The women were both in their mid-twenties, had both been in excellent physical health, and were both now dead, one by drowning and one from a blunt force trauma in the shape of a blow to the head. The first woman had been dead a minimum of five days, the second about three weeks. One had almost certainly been murdered, while the death of the other could have been accidental. The only thing at all unusual was that they were identical twins.

"OK, Mulder," she said as she left the autopsy room and started pulling off her scrubs, "what do you know that I don't?"

"You really shouldn't feed me straight lines like that." he said, a twinkle in his eye.

"Mulder!"

"OK, OK. The weirdness here doesn't lie in how they died but in how they lived. Take a look at this."

He handed her a folder. Inside were fingerprint sheets and the results of dental examinations of the two women. It took Scully a few seconds to register their significance.

"This can't be. It's impossible!"

"And yet it's true. Both women have had identical work done on their teeth and have absolutely identical fingerprints."

"But even identical twins don't have matching fingerprints. And no two people, even if they began with identical teeth, could possibly subject them to wear and tear so identical as to need identical work done on them, and no dentist could do identical work, either."

"Interesting, isn't it?"

"Yes, though what we're seeing here could just be a statistical anomaly, a one in a million occurrence."

Mulder raised an eyebrow at that. He believed in a lot of things the average person would scoff at, but he had never been a big believer in coincidence.

"Then this might interest you."

He handed Scully another file, this time containing an arrest report by a Sheriff Dan Turton of Conner Cove, Maine. The photograph clipped to the report showed one of the dead women, full face and side view. She was holding up a board with a number on it. The sheriff had written her name in the report as 'Lucy Prince', but this had then been crossed out with a ballpoint pen. Another name had not been added in its place.

"It says this woman, whatever her name is, was discovered digging up a buried body...four days ago. Mulder, both those women on the slab in there were already dead four days ago."

"It gets better. The body she was discovered digging up is one of those on the slab, the one bludgeoned to death. Now look at her fingerprints."

Scully compared the fingerprints on the arrest report to those taken from the two corpses. All three sets were identical. She was beginning to feel faint. This defied all logic.

"So, one of these women is Lucy Prince?" she asked.

"No. Lucy Prince is neither dead nor incarcerated. As far as I know, she's currently at home in Conner Cove with her husband, Greg. Here's a photo of them taken a few months ago"

Scully took the picture. It showed a tall, and she thought rather handsome man with his arm around the waist of a pretty young woman in her mid-twenties. She was a dead ringer for the other three women.

"So now I suppose we're off to Maine to try and find out what the heck is going on?"

"Yes, and also to investigate the disappearance of Sheriff Turton, who seems to have vanished without trace."


	2. Chapter 2

CONNER COVE, MAINE.

It had been a long drive. They had stayed overnight in a hotel in Portland, and set off at the crack of dawn. It was still morning when they found themselves a few miles outside Conner Cove.

"Never been this far north and east in the state", mused Mulder. "We used to vacation in Maine when I was a boy. Bar Harbor, mostly, just like everyone else, but we'd do it off-season, after the leaves had fallen and the tourists had all gone home. We'd stay in a housekeeping cabin and have things pretty much to ourselves. It's like a totally different place then, with all the shops shut up for the winter, but there were these great, raw, overcast days that were perfect for beachcombing while listening to the roar of the Atlantic surf. Feels kinda weird being up here in the spring, actually."

At the wheel of the car, Scully smiled slightly but said nothing. She enjoyed listening to Mulder wax lyrical.

Five minutes later they topped a rise and there was Conner Cove below them. It looked like any number of other small towns along the cost of Maine, but more prosperous than many. There were several boats bobbing within the protective arms of the harbor walls, most of which seemed to be pleasure craft of various sorts rather than the fishing vessels that would once have been associated with the area. The harbor took up one end of the cove, a shingle beach sweeping around the rest of its curve. Driving down the hill and into the town proper, Scully noted that all the houses were freshly painted, their small gardens well-tended. If not affluent, Conner Cove was certainly getting by in reasonable comfort.

Parking their car on the main street, Mulder and Scully made the local sheriff's office their first port of call. Outside the office, a man in a deputy sheriff's uniform was taking stacks of leaflets from a box and stuffing them into a wire display rack. As they neared it, he ducked into the office without having seen them. Mulder picked up one of the leaflets and started to read. It had a photograph of a dolphin on the front.

"According to the brochure, Conner Cove started out as a fishing village back in the late 1770s. It pretty much stayed that way until the late 1950s, gradually growing until the town had a population of several hundred. The fishing industry wasted away for the usual reasons, leaving the town in pretty parlous economic straits. Population gradually shrank as people moved away until it stabilized at the current couple of hundred. The town's salvation was first that it became a sort of artist's colony in the 1960s and, more recently, that it's begun attracting tourists in reasonable numbers. That last is due primarily to Greg Prince and to Billy the dolphin."

"Billy the dolphin?"

"Yeah," chuckled Mulder. "Seems this dolphin decided to adopt the town. He's been coming back every spring for the past six years. Stays in the cove until late summer. People love swimming with dolphins and the town hasn't been slow to take advantage of that fact. It's inspired them to look into whale-watching boat trips as well, apparently. Three cheers for eco-tourism, I guess. Then there's Greg Prince."

"Wait! You mean he's *that* Greg Prince? I just didn't make the connection."

"Yeah, he's that Greg Prince. Writer of big novels of modern horror set in picturesque New England towns and villages not unlike Conner Cove itself. Every new book goes straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and most are optioned by Hollywood for seven-figure sums before they're even published. His fans make the pilgrimage from all over the world to camp outside his home and seek out locations he's used in his books."

"They sound like just the sort of books you'd enjoy."

"Not really. They're much too fanciful for my taste."

Scully gave her partner a quick sideways glance. His delivery was so deadpan she could never be sure when he was pulling her leg.

"So as well as Billy, the town has been making what money it can from having a famous author move there?"

"Pretty much, only Prince didn't relocate to Conner Cove; he was born here. The Princes have been with the town pretty much from the beginning. Apart from a few years spent at college in New York, Greg has lived here all his life."

Mulder stuffed the leaflet in his pocket and they entered the office. They set a bell over the door ringing when they opened it. Inside, a pretty child with long blonde hair was sitting on a chair, stroking a cat and swinging her legs back and forth. The sheriff's deputy emerged from the rear office carrying another box of leaflets.

"Just got this season's tourist brochure's in from the printer in Brunswick," he said, "and Conner Cove being as small as it is it falls to me to put them on display every year. So, can I do somethin' for you folks?"

"We're from the FBI," said Mulder, showing his ID. "I'm Agent Mulder and this is Agent Scully."

"Ah good" We been expectin' you." he said, shaking their hands. "I'm Deputy Sheriff John Nottingham, and this is my daughter, Callie."

Mulder tried to suppress a smile, but he caught it.

"That's alright, Agent Mulder," he chuckled, "I'm used to people finding it funny that someone called 'Nottingham' would end up in a sheriff's office. Of course, this is just a local sheriff's office set up under the town's original charter. We don't usually have much to do with the county sheriff's office."

"Until recently." said Scully.

"Yes, ma'am, until recently. Alright, Callie," he said, turning to the little girl, you run along now and go see if Billy's got here yet."

"OK, Daddy." she said, leaping off the chair and dashing out the door.

"What a pretty little girl," said Scully. "How old is she?"

"She's just coming up on seven. Fortunately, it's her mother she favors in the looks department. Now then, before we go any further, there's something I need to show you folks."

He opened a filing cabinet drawer and took out a sheriff's uniform, sealed in a plastic bag.

"This was found on the shore earlier this morning. It's Sheriff Turton's. And that's not all. When I arrived in the office there was a message waiting for me on our computer."

Going over to his desk, he tapped in a password then swivelled the monitor around so they could read the message:

John - By the time you read this I will have ended it. You know what I've been struggling with these past few months so you'll understand better than most why I've decided to do this. It's not a decision I came to lightly. That's why I disappeared these past three days. I had to go somewhere to be alone, to sort things out in my head and be absolutely sure I was making the right decision. And I am sure, John. I've left an envelope on my TV containing $10,000. Please pass this along to Susan Prentice. And please see that Hoover is taken care of. It's been an honor and a privilege knowing you and working alongside you. Looks like you're the new Sheriff. No one deserves it more. Your friend, Dan

"'Hoover'?"

"His cat. That was him with Callie."

"And Susan Prentice?"

"Just one of the townswomen. She used to work for the Princes. Funny thing him leaving her that money, though, because he'd never been that close to her. Dan got along with pretty much everyone, but there were people he was closer to than Susan."

"Do you believe the note to be genuine, deputy?" asked Scully.

"Yes. ma'am, I do. Only Dan and I had keys to this office, and only we knew the password to get into the computer. But the real clincher is where he says I know what he'd been struggling with the past few months. I do, and he never told another soul. Dan had terminal cancer. The specialist he saw in Portland figured he had maybe three months left. And it was gonna get bad at the end. I certainly understand why he did what he did."

"Did he have a wife or children, or other loved ones?" asked Scully.

"Nope. Dan was a lifelong bachelor. Just him and Hoover in that little apartment of his. Dan was a helluva nice guy, Agent Mulder, and everyone liked him, but there was always a secret sadness about him, as if maybe he'd somehow missed out on a big part of life. He was the town's sheriff for almost thirty years. For a lot of us it seemed like he'd been there forever. It's going to be strange not having him around. We threw a big surprise party for him on his sixtieth birthday last year. That's a picture of him at the party on his desk."

Mulder picked up the framed photograph. It showed the sheriff surrounded by friends in party hats. He was tall and portly, with thinning grey hair, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He was smiling, but his eyes seemed to be hiding something. Mulder could see what John Nottingham meant about his 'secret sorrow'.

"Assuming, for now, this is all kosher, let's move on to this thing with the bodies. Firstly, what can you tell us about Lucy Prince."

"Greg married her about five years ago. He met her during a book-signing in Boston and fell for her immediately. Ever since we were boys together, Greg had been telling me he had dreams in which the face of his soulmate, the woman he was going to marry, would appear to him, and that they were going to make each other very happy. Greg always talked like that. He was a great believer in the supernatural, in destiny and 'the mysterious hand of fate'. I used to laugh at him when he got like that, but he's the one that used that stuff to make millions and here I am a lowly sheriff's deputy. Still, I don't begrudge him his success. Greg's another one of those really nice guys that no one has a bad word for, just like the sheriff was.

Anyway, as soon as he set eyes on Lucy Jensen he knew he was seeing that face he'd seen so often in his dreams, or so he told me. They had a whirlwind romance and the wedding was a lavish affair at Greg's house - that big one on the hill overlooking most of the cove - that the whole town was invited to. Conner Cove had never seen anything like it. I think maybe Greg set too much store by those dreams, though. Lucy's a nice enough girl and all, but they just never struck me as being all that compatible. Greg doesn't talk about it much but he hasn't seemed all that happy the last few times we talked.

Over the past year Lucy has been spending more and more time away from Conner Cove. When she returned last time, about a month ago, she had her brother, Frank Jensen, in tow. I didn't like him at all. He stayed up at the house, used Greg's cars all the time and generally acted like some sort of big shot while he was here. I'm sure the money he was flashing around was Greg's, too. He was particularly taken with Greg's powerboat and would spend hours zooming around the waters of the cove in it. I was curious why he hadn't been at their wedding, particularly as he's just about Lucy's only close relative, so I did a little digging of my own. Turns out he couldn't be there because he was doing time in Massachusetts for fraud and for manslaughter. The authorities were convinced it was murder, but they could only get Frank for manslaughter. Nice to find out your instincts are sound, but I wasn't happy we had a man like that in our community. Fortunately, he left after seven or eight days. It was two weeks after this the first body turned up."

"Who found the body?" asked Scully.

"A couple of local kids who'd gone down to the shore to make out after dark. They spotted something in the surf, went to investigate, and found the body of a naked woman. When me and the sheriff got there we recognised her immediately. It was Lucy Prince.

Neither of us was looking forward to being the one who told Greg his wife was dead. As it happens, he was out of town that evening, though we didn't know that at the time. You can imagine our surprise when we drove up to the house and it was Lucy herself opened the door to us, alive and well. Not that the sheriff showed his surprise; he knew better than that. Lucy called us in and he asked her if she had a twin sister. She was startled by that, and instantly denied it, but the sheriff and I could both tell by her manner that something wasn't right. We told her about the body and she agreed to come back with us and identify it. Boy, was she spooked by that body! She kept saying 'I don't believe this, I don't believe this'. Now, OK, it must be a pretty freaky thing to come face to face with what looks like your own dead body, but the sheriff was convinced there was more to it, that she had some inkling what was going on.

After we took her home we waited outside in the car, with our lights off. The sheriff was playing a hunch, and it was a good one. About an hour later we saw Mrs Prince come out of the house carrying a shovel and a flashlight. She headed into the woods up behind the house and we followed. Local kids have been playing in those woods like forever. I played in them as a boy and my Callie loves to play in them too, so I knew them pretty well, but they look totally different in the dark. Since we obviously didn't want to be seen, we couldn't use our own flashlights and so had to follow by the light from hers in the distance. We kept tripping over tree roots and the like and she soon got ahead of us. We lost her completely, but we stopped and listened and eventually we picked up the faint sound of her digging some distance further on. We followed the sound, crept up on her, and arrived just in time to see her digging up a body. That's when we drew our guns, turned our flashlights on her, and shouted 'Freeze'. I've always wanted to shout that. When we investigated and saw whose body she was digging up we thought we'd entered the Twilight Zone. It was another Lucy Prince. This one had had the back of her head caved in. We arrested the live Lucy Prince, of course, but she refused to tell us anything about the dead ones. As we were leading her out of the woods, Greg arrived back at the house. He demanded to know what was happening, so we showed him. He was completely dumbfounded, and who wouldn't be?"

"So how does the fourth Lucy Prince figure in all this?" demanded Scully.

"I'm just getting to that part. After we'd shown Greg the bodies and he'd finally left, the sheriff sent me back to the woods to mark off the body there and cover it with a tarp until the forensics boys could get here from the county sheriff's office. He took his flashlight and said he was going back to the shore to see what he could find. The tide would be coming in before it got light and he didn't want any evidence being washed away. So I did as he asked, waited 'til the forensics boys could get to the wood, which was after dawn, then I went home to bed. Didn't get back in to the office 'til early the next afternoon. There was no sign of Dan. So I picked up something Callie had left in the office the day before and headed up to the wood. They'd just finished their work and were loading the body into the county coroner's van. The body from the shore was already in there. They took the bodies away, and the county sheriff took the live Lucy Prince off to the county lock-up.

Back at the office, there was still no sign of Dan, so I caught up with my paperwork. There was a lot of that to go along with everything that had happened in the past day. About 8pm, just as I was about to close up the office, I received a call from Greg who needed me to meet him at his house. So I drove up there, he let me in, and who should be sitting in a big chair in the main parlour, nursing a brandy, but Lucy Prince.

Thinking she'd escaped custody, I started drawing my gun but Greg stopped me. 'No John' says he, 'this isn't the same woman. This is the real Lucy. The woman you arrested is an imposter who had Lucy locked away in the attic for the past two weeks'."

"Locked away in the attic?" said Mulder.

"That's what they claimed. Greg heard noises from the attic when he was upstairs, went to investigate, and found Lucy trussed up on a portable cot, surrounded by the remains of the meals the imposter had been bringing her."

"And you believed this story?" said Scully.

"I had no reason not to, ma'am. The way Greg and Lucy were together, the way they looked at each other, well I hadn't seen that since the early days of their marriage and I was real happy for them. I guess it took the shock of what happened to make them look at each other again and maybe realize what they almost lost. And that's pretty much it. I reported all this to the county sheriff's office, filed a missing persons report on Dan, and they got back to me to let me know they were calling in the FBI. In the meantime, Dan came back from wherever he'd been, typed that suicide note, and went off and drowned himself. Some of the local men have been out searching in their boats, but we haven't found his body yet.

So, does the FBI have any more idea what's going on here than we do? Because I have to tell you, we're stumped."

"'Fraid not," said Mulder, "but we'll do our best to get to the bottom of this. I think we need to start off by talking to Susan Prentice."


	3. Chapter 3

Outside a few minutes later, as they walked along the street enjoying the spring sunshine and the salt air, Scully asked:

"So why start with Susan Prentice?"

"She worked at the Prince house. I'd like to have anything she can give us on hand before we confront the Princes."

"Are you keeping something from me, Mulder? Do you know why we have two dead Lucy Princes and two live ones?"

"I have my suspicions. There are several things it could be and I need to eliminate those it isn't first. For instance, we could be dealing with parallel universes."

"Parallel universes?"

"Yes. The many worlds theory derives from quantum mechanics and suggests there may be an infinite number of universes existing parallel to each other, occupying the same physical space only dimensionally separated. Many of these would be almost identical to this one, the Lucy Princes of those universes all but indistinguishable from our own. It's possible that, for whatever reason, those other Lucy Princes are being drawn to our universe."

"You can't seriously believe that."

"Scully, the only things I seriously believe are that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill JFK, aliens abducted my sister, and the Orioles will one day win the World Series. However, the many worlds theory offers an explanation that fits in a way that, say, cloning doesn't. With cloning you have exactly the same problem explaining away the teeth and fingerprints as you do with twins."

"And, TV and movie sci-fi to the contrary, while we may be able to clone a human being we can't make them instant adults. They would have to grow up at the same rate as everyone else." said Scully.

"Exactly. Which means we probably aren't looking for a secret cloning laboratory. Ah, we're here. This is the address Deputy Sheriff Nottingham gave us."

The house was on a side road off the main street. It was on a hill and was small but pleasingly picturesque. Mulder rapped on the wooden door. Susan Prentice turned out to be a small, dark-haired woman in her early forties. When they showed her their FBI IDs she invited them in.

"I assume you're here about the sheriff and the murders? A dreadful affair, just dreadful."

"Deputy Nottingham tells us you used to work up at the Prince house?" said Scully.

"That's right. I was the housekeeper. I worked there for seven years, first for Mr Prince and then for both of them after they got wed."

"It must've been difficult having another woman come into the house," said Scully. "How did you and Mrs Prince get along?"

"Well, we weren't friends or anything, and she was a bit wary of me at first, a bit high-handed when it came to establishing her authority, but she soon got over that and we had a proper employer/employee relationship."

"So why aren't you working there now?" asked Mulder.

"Because of that awful woman who kidnapped the real Mrs Prince. I didn't know she was an imposter at the time, of course - who could have guessed - but I knew something was wrong because of how cold she was to me. It was two weeks ago. She called me into the study and fired me with no warning and no explanation. She wanted me gone and just like that I was out. I know now that she probably didn't want me around because she thought I knew the real Mrs Prince well enough to figure out she was an imposter, but if those other bodies hadn't shown up I doubt it would have even occurred to me, or to anyone else for that matter.

What really hurts is that when I went up to the house after it all came out about the real Mrs Prince being held captive, I expected to get my job back. But Mr Prince told me he wouldn't reinstate me. So I'm jobless. At least it's almost the start of tourist season. That means there should be some seasonal work available in a few weeks, anyway. Assuming that damn dolphin gets here soon, that is."

"Why do you think Sheriff Turton left $10,000 to you?" asked Scully.

"Do you know, I haven't the faintest idea. The sheriff was a lovely man, as anyone will tell you, but while he was always pleasant to me, as he was to everyone, we weren't close. There were others who were drinking buddies and whom he used to play cards with who were closer to him. Why he didn't leave it to them I don't know. He had his quirks, did Dan Turton. John Nottingham told me he kept that money in a box in his apartment, that he didn't use banks. He thinks it may even have been the sheriff's life savings, which makes it even stranger he left it to me."

"I see," said Mulder. "Well thank you, Ms Prentice; you've been a big help."

"She has?" said Scully a little later, as they headed back to their car. "In what way was she a big help, Mulder?"

"In confirming my suspicion that whoever the Lucy Prince up there in that house on the hill may be, she isn't the real one. I think it's finally time we gave the Princes a visit."

The Prince house was a mansion, a large, imposing old building sitting on a road high above the town. It had been built a century earlier, at the height of the town's prosperity when the fishing business was booming and Abraham Prince was making a lot of money buying up all the then plentiful local catch and selling it on to canneries and directly to the big cities further south along the coast. The condition of the mansion had steadily deteriorated with the declining fortunes of Conner Cove itself. With the vast sums he had made from his writing, Abraham's descendant Greg Prince had halted and then reversed the mansion's decline, restoring it to its original glory and more. There were local rumours the ghost of Abraham Prince haunted the house, of course, but no one could honestly say they had ever seen him.

Mulder and Scully were certainly impressed as they drove up to the house, stopping to take in both the building itself and the great view out over the cove when they climbed out of the car. Greg Prince himself answered the door, ushering them in to the main parlour and offering them a drink, which they declined. He was dressed only in a bathrobe and Scully was once again taken with how handsome he was, with his good looks, easy smile, and a physique that looked like it would be more at home on a professional athlete than on a writer. She noticed a bruise on his neck...no, wait. That wasn't a bruise but a hickey, and a fresh one, too.

"So what can I do for the FBI?" he said, pouring himself a drink.

"I think you can guess what we've come about," said Scully, feeling slightly flustered at having those piercing blue eyes turned on her.

"Ah, yes. The strange affair of the four Lucy Princes. My wife is upstairs fixing her hair and make-up. She'll join us shortly. If either of us were likely to have any inkling as to what's going on it would be her, but I'm afraid she's just as non-plussed by this whole affair as I am. As a writer, I have to say it has definite possibilities as the basis for a horror novel, however."

"As a writer, what would you attribute these doppelgangers to in that novel?"

"Really, Mr Mulder," he laughed, "do you think any novel I write will be a thinly disguised version of what's actually going on here, even supposing I had the first clue what that might be? No, I like to think I have more imagination than that. At the moment I'm leaning towards having my protagonist split in four after offending a local Native American spirit, each of those four representing a different aspect of the total person."

"That might work," said Mulder.

"What might work?" came a melodius voice from behind them. They turned to see a vision of loveliness framed by the doorway. She was in her mid twenties, had long, blonde hair, an angelic face which was lightly made up, and a perfect figure whose lines were all too visible through her bathrobe. She was wearing strappy heels, large gold-hoop earrings, and several slender gold bracelets on each wrist. This was the first time Mulder and Scully had seen Lucy Prince as a living, breathing person rather than a lifeless corpse on an autopsy slab. They were both impressed.

"I was just telling the agents how I might use this situation in a novel, darling," said Greg, going over and kissing his wife on the cheek. She smiled and gave him an adoring look.

Mulder wondered why they were both still in their bathrobes, then he spotted Greg's neck and flushed slightly. Scully noticed this and smiled. There were ways in which her partner was still a little unworldly.

"Do you have any idea who those other women might be, Mrs Prince?" he asked.

"I wish I did," she replied. "No one wants to get to the bottom of this more than me, I assure you. Can you imagine how weird it is to know there are several exact duplicates of you roaming around?"

"Well there's only one of them still capable of doing any roaming," said Mulder, "and she's currently incarcerated. How did she come to take your place?"

"I answered the door one night when Greg was on the road, and there she was. I was too stunned at the sight of her to move for a moment, and she took full advantage of that moment to press a cloth over my nose and mouth. I don't know what was on it, but I lost consciousness within seconds. When I came to, I was in the attic where Greg later found me, gagged and trussed up on a camp bed. It's where I stayed for the next two weeks.

I only saw her after that when she brought me food or supervised my visits to the bathroom. She asked me questions about aspects of my life on several occasions, but other than that she just left me up there by myself. I tried to escape, but I couldn't work those bonds loose. I've never been so glad to see anyone in my life as I was when Greg found me. Knowing what had happened made me reappraise my whole life. Greg and I had seriously drifted apart and I realised that it was almost all my fault. I vowed then and there that things were going to change. I was going to save my marriage."

"And things have changed," said Greg, giving his wife a reassuring hug as she gave him another dazzling smile. "It's just as if we were newlyweds again, and I don't think I've ever been happier."

"How did the imposter get you up to the attic, Mrs Prince?", asked Mulder. "If you were unconscious she couldn't possibly have carried you up there without help."

"You may be right. Maybe she did have an accomplice we haven't uncovered yet. You'd have to take that up with her."

"I intend to. In the meantime, Mrs Prince," said Mulder, fishing something out of his pocket, "I'd like you to touch this medallion."

Lucy Prince blanched at the sight of the medallion in Mulder's hand, and backed away from him.

"No, no, I...keep it away from me!"

Mulder advanced on her, holding the medallion out, as she backed away. Greg Prince looked puzzled, then it was as if a lightbulb had switched on over his head. He thrust himself between Mulder and his wife.

"I think it's time you both left, Agent Mulder," he said, coldly. "My wife and I have nothing more to say to you."

"That's OK, Mr Prince. I've learned everything here I'd hoped to."

Outside, as the door slammed behind them, Scully turned to face her partner. She was furious.

"What the hell was that all about, Mulder?" she demanded.

"It was about eliminating possibilities and discovering who knows what," he said, "And I now know we're not dealing with parallel worlds and that Greg Prince knows exactly what's going on here."

"I'm glad that one of us does. Would you care to enlighten me?"

"Soon, I promise. In the meantime I need you to trust me, just for a few more hours. I also need you to wear this." he said, holding up the medallion.

Scully nodded, and allowed him to drop the chain over her head. When he had done so, she held the medallion up and examined it. It was a tacky looking thing, with what appeared to be some sort of cherub or angel on one side and what might be a foreign language inscribed on the back. Scully went for tasteful, expensively cut suits, and this definitely did not go with them.

"Mulder, this thing is hideous," she said.

"If you say so, Scully. I never had much of an eye for jewellery. Fortunately, I only need you to wear it until we solve this case, and that's going to be soon. Now let's go talk to the other living Lucy Prince."


	4. Chapter 4

WOMEN'S CORRECTIONAL FACILITY,  
>WASHINGTON COUNTY, MAINE.<p>

The room they were in was bare save for a simple table with a chair. There were metal rings set into the table top and the room had a single steel door but no windows, lighting being provided by a harsh fluorescent fitting overhead. It was, thought Scully, singularly bleak and depressing. Having spent the last two hours driving here, she was not in the most alert frame of mind and certainly not ready for what happened next. One moment she was glancing up as she heard the door open, seeing a familiar figure in prison orange, the next she was falling backwards as the woman launched herself across the table, one hand clawing for the medallion around Scully's neck, the other reaching for Mulder's shirt. Before she could make contact with either of them, the guards recovered enough from their shock to grab the woman and pull her down on to the chair, securing her to the metal rings with handcuffs as she struggled with them. Once this was done, and it was obvious she was going nowhere, the woman calmed down in seconds, though she kept glaring hungrily at the medallion.

"So who are you two and what do you want?" she snarled.

Scully was taken aback by how different this version of Lucy Prince was to the woman they had met in Conner Cove a few hours earlier. She had the same angelic face, long blonde hair, and perfect figure, but there the resemblance ended.

"We need to ask you a few questions," said Mulder. "The big one, of course, is 'just who are you?'".

"I'm Lucy Prince. They tell me someone claiming to be me, someone who says I kidnapped her, came out of the woodwork after I was arrested. I don't know who that bitch is, but she's a damn liar. I didn't kidnap anyone."

"OK, then who are the two dead women and why are all four of you totally indistinguishable from each other by any test we know?"

"Beats me. It's a mystery."

"At the very least you had to know something about the woman whose body you were caught digging up. Things look pretty bad for you there. You were caught red-handed with the body of a murder victim."

The woman grinned at Mulder then, and it wasn't a pleasant grin.

"They may have caught me with the body, but there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that I killed her. Or do you honestly believe forensic tests are going to be able to tell my DNA from hers? No, all the evidence against me is circumstantial. And when I come up against that other bitch in court, I'll prove I'm the real Lucy Prince and she's the imposter."

"I wish you luck. Thank you guards. We're done here."

Back in their car, Scully turned to Mulder and said:

"OK, that's it! 'We're done here'? You had me drive all this way for _that_? I've been patient, Mulder, but I'm not driving us back until you explain what's going on. What is this medallion and why was one Lucy Prince so eager to get her hands on it when the other one was terrified of it?"

"You're right; it is time I explained. And this wasn't a wasted journey. I needed to see how she reacted to the medallion to confirm a theory, and now I have. I know who that Lucy Prince really is."

"Who is she?"

"Appearances to the contrary, the woman in that facility is Frank Jensen, the real Lucy's brother."

"What? How is that possible?"

"That's where the medallion comes in. Oh, don't worry. The one around your neck is a fake, a replica I confiscated a few years back from someone who was using it in a scam."

He retrieved his briefcase from the rear seat and pulled out a file. It was an X-file. He handed it to Scully.

"What we're dealing with here is the Medallion of Zulo. If two people touch it at the same time, it will transform each into a copy of the other. If someone wearing it touches a piece of clothing once worn by someone else to the medallion, it will lock onto the spoor on that clothing and they will be transformed into a copy of that person. Being pregnant or menstruating blocks any change. The time a complete transformation takes to occur varies, but around half an hour or so is the time most commonly reported. Also, a transformee cannot be transformed again until twelve hours has elapsed. My own theory, based on the work of Rupert Sheldrake, is this is the minimum time required for a person's morphic field to stabilize after a transformation.

According to one legend, it was created in Africa by a tribal witch doctor and used to transform the entire tribe into copies of their strongest warrior during times of conflict. I have no idea as to the truth or otherwise of this legend. Anyway, somehow it made its way to the New World. The earliest reports of it I've been able to track down date to the Victorian period, but it may have been here even earlier. Certainly since then there have been reports of it from all over the country, right up to the present day.

You might think that someone who had the medallion could use it to make themselves rich and powerful, since they'd be able to dispense youth and beauty at will, but the medallion is a powerful instrument of fate and almost impossible to hold on to for any length of time. It's been lost, stolen, and even deliberately discarded countless times through its existence."

Scully was rummaging through the police reports and newspaper clippings in the file, some of them decades old. She picked one up at random, a clipping from the 1930s, and started reading:

WIFE TURNED ME INTO A 6 YEAR  
>-OLD, CLAIMS CHILD.<p>

Wearing a pink dress, ribbons in  
>her hair, little Loretta Smith is<br>the spitting image of child starlet  
>Miss Shirley Temple. In one respect,<br>however, she differs from other girls  
>her age. According to Loretta, she is<br>really Albert Smith, 36, her mother's  
>late husband, and her mother turned her<br>into a child using a magic medallion,  
>faking Arthur's death in order to<br>collect on his insurance.

Rose Smith, who adopted Loretta after  
>her husband's death, is as bemused as<br>everyone else by her daughter's claims  
>and by the depth of her apparent<br>knowledge about Arthur. Child expert  
>Dr Clark Willows, while agreeing that<br>her knowledge and her precociousness  
>are remarkable in one so young, claims<br>this level of fantasizing is not at all  
>unusual.<p>

"Children view the world in a very  
>different way to you and me", said Dr<br>Willows, "and their capacity for  
>fantasy is much greater than it would<br>be in an adult. Nevertheless, children  
>have to be taught the difference<br>between what is real and what is not  
>and the depth of the fantasizing in<br>this case suggests to me there has so  
>far been an insufficient application of<br>discipline in this child's life. As the  
>Bible says: 'spare the rod, spoil the<br>child'."

Mrs Smith expressed her gratitude for  
>the Dr's sound advice and said that she<br>intended taking her daughter over her  
>knee in future and applying regular<br>spankings.

"It's the only way," said Dr Willows,  
>approvingly. "Children have to be taught<br>who's the boss and what will and will  
>not be tolerated."<p>

There were dozens of these. Women claiming they were really men, men claiming they were really women, children who claimed to have switched with parents, young with old, black with white, rich with poor, and a surprising number of husbands with wives. The variety of people claiming they were really someone else was truly impressive. And what all these reports had in common was that in every case the agent of these alleged changes was a mysterious medallion.

"Are you really asking me to believe we're dealing with a magic medallion in Conner Cove, Mulder?" asked Scully.

"I'm asking you to accept it as a possibility, however hypothetical. Proceed as if you accept the premise, for now, and let's see how this all falls out. And you have to admit, the reactions to the replica medallion have been interesting."

"Yes, why did the women react so differently to it?" "The Lucy Prince back in Conner Cove is obviously very happy being who she is now and was terrified at the prospect of having that taken away from her. Greg Prince was puzzled by her reaction at first - it's clear he'd never seen the medallion before - but he quickly realized what it must be and moved to protect her from it, so he clearly knows what's been going on.

The Lucy Prince we just visited, the former Frank Jensen, on the other hand, knows she's in a bad position and is looking for a way out. When she saw your medallion she decided this was her chance to escape. Had the medallion been real, and had she succeeded in grabbing it and pressing a piece of my shirt to it, that would've turned her into a doppelganger of me."

"What good would that have done her?"

"The transformation typically takes half an hour, remember, and I assume it takes several minutes before the first changes are apparent to an observer. After having brought shirt and medallion together, she would have refused to see us and demanded she be taken back to her cell, as is her right. Once there, I figure she would've dived under the blanket on her bed and stayed there until the change was complete. Then, having allowed a suitable time for us to get well clear of the prison, she would've screamed blue murder until the guards came and found what appeared to be me in her cell. She'd then claim she was me, that the incarcerated Lucy Prince had somehow switched places with her, and the prison authorities would free 'Agent Mulder' with profuse apologies that this could've happened."

"So why did Frank Jensen become his sister in the first place? Accident or deliberate?" asked Scully.

"Oh, it was deliberate. Frank somehow got hold of the real Medallion of Zulo and had it with him when Lucy brought him to Conner Cove. After several days getting the lay of the land, he transformed into a copy of her and then killed her, burying her body in the woods. This was going to be his big score. Greg Prince is a multi- millionaire and as soon as the opportunity presented itself I'm sure Frank would've killed him, too. As the wife, she stood to inherit all of those millions in the event of Greg's death. And since Greg and the real Lucy Prince were barely speaking to each other by this point, Frank knew there wouldn't be any conjugal duties to perform. Now, of course, she's in a very different situation. She genuinely doesn't know who the other woman claiming to be Lucy Prince is and her only real option is to keep insisting she's the real deal and has no idea who the other three are.

If a hearing is held to determine who is the real Lucy Prince, however, I think she's certain to lose - Greg Prince will insist the woman living with him is really his wife, and he will be believed - then Frank has no legal identity and is as much a Jane Doe as the two corpses. Neither woman will mention the medallion in any hearing - they wouldn't be believed, anyway - so I think Frank is in for a long stretch for kidnapping and concealing a body. There may never have been an actual kidnapping, but she did kill her sister so it's no more than she deserves."

"I still find it hard to accept that one of the Lucy Princes started out as a man."

"Actually, apart from the real Lucy, I think they all started out male. Now c'mon, Scully. It's time you drove us back to Conner Cove."


	5. Chapter 5

CONNER COVE, MAINE.

Darkness was descending when Mulder and Scully got back to Conner Cove, and this early in spring that meant the temperature was also falling precipitously. Shivering, they hurried over to the sheriff's office after parking the car. Inside they were greeted by John Nottingham, now wearing a full sheriff's uniform and badge.

"Looks like congratulations are in order," said Mulder.

"Yeah," he beamed, "The town council ratified my appointment this afternoon."

"Yes. Congratulations, sheriff," added Scully.

"Thank you, ma'am. And I see," he said, noticing the medallion around her neck, "that you found my daughter's medallion."

"What?" said Mulder. "Sheriff, are you saying you've seen this medallion before?"

"Of course I have. I told you I ducked into the office on the day Dan Turton disappeared and retrieved something Callie had left behind. Well, it was that medallion."

"Had you seen the medallion before that?"

"Well, not that I noticed, no. Mary - that's my wife - had to describe it to me. When I got to the office there it was, right on top of Dan's desk."

Mulder squatted down next to Dan Turton's desk and fished around underneath it with his hand. He emerged with a medallion that bore only a superficial resemblance to the one around Scully's neck.

"I think you'll find this is Callie's medallion, Sheriff." he said.

"Well, I'll be... So what was that medallion on Dan's desk?"

"Something that could be the key to everything that's been happening in Conner Cove recently. Now I need you to tell me exactly, and I mean _exactly_, what you did with the medallion."

"When I saw it there on the desk I figured it had to be Callie's because it fitted the description and there were several of her long, blonde hairs caught in the chain, at least I thought they were hers - she's always getting her hair caught in stuff. I picked it up by the chain, pulled out the hairs, dropped them in the wastebasket, and stuffed it in my trouser pocket. When I saw Callie the next day, I remembered the medallion, and tossed it to her. She caught it, said 'Thank, you Daddy', then headed out to play. Next time I saw her she told me she'd lost it playing in the woods."

Mulder sighed. There would be little point searching the woods. The medallion was long gone by now.

"OK, thank you, Sheriff. Guess there's nothing we can do about it now. Do you have the key to Dan Turton's apartment? There are a few loose ends we still need to tie up and we'd like to check it out."

"Sure thing," he said, reaching over and taking a key down from the row of hooks on the wall. "I'm heading home now so slide it under the office door when you're done."

Dan Turton's apartment was clean, surprisingly neat for a bachelor pad, and oddly austere. It struck Scully as repressed, perhaps mirroring something about its owner.

"So are we looking for anything in particular, Mulder," she asked or are we just tossing the place on general principle?"

"I'm looking for his collection of pornography. Sheriff Turton was a single man and it's a law of nature that single men always have a stash of pornography. By their porn shall ye know them, Scully."

"Not everyone is like you, Mulder. I think there may be some projection going on here."

He laughed out loud at that, and was still chuckling as he examined the pile of magazines next to the sofa. There were several law enforcement journals, a few copies of **Guns & Ammo**, and, incongruously, a copy of the latest **Vogue**.

"I think I may have found something over here." said Scully.

She had been going through the closet and had pulled out an ancient suitcase. The salt air had gotten to it and the hinges and lock were pitted with rust.

"An old cardboard suitcase," said Mulder, wonderingly, "I haven't seen one of those in years."

Taking out his knife, Mulder slid the blade behind the lock and wrenched it free of the surrounding cardboard. The suitcase was full of women's clothing of a style popular forty years earlier. From their musty smell, Mulder didn't think the suitcase had been opened in all that time. On top of the clothing was a cheap red wig.

"Oh my," said Scully."So the sheriff was a cross-dresser?"

"Not recently, if this is anything to go by," said Mulder. "In fact, I think he was more than a cross-dresser. I think he was gender dysphoric and that forty years ago, for whatever reason, he locked away that part of himself as completely as he locked away this clothing. Maybe it was family or peer pressure, or some misguided sense of how he should really be, or even just a failure of nerve, but I think Dan Turton has been living a lie for the past four decades.

John Nottingham mentioned his 'secret sorrow', and I saw it in his eyes, too. There's no way you can repress something like that without it hurting you psychologically, and sometimes even physically. The stress of holding all that in may be what triggered his cancer."

"Oh that poor, poor man," said Scully, softly, knowing her partner had it right, "Why did he do that to himself?"

"We may find out shortly. Y'know," mused Mulder, "you can't hold back something that fundamental about yourself without it seeping out in small. almost subconscious ways."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, this could be the reason he named his cat after a famous, cross-dressing, law-enforcement official."

It took a second for this to resister with Scully.

"Oh, come on, Mulder, that's really reaching. And anyway, as far as anyone knows those stories about Director Hoover were just scurrilous fabrications."

"Maybe," he replied, taking his cellphone out and tapping out a number, "and maybe not. We need to make one last visit in order to close this investigation. Hello, is that Mrs Prince? This is Agent Mulder. I apologise for the stunt I pulled earlier. We need to see you one last time and I was wondering if we could...we can? Thank you. We'll be there in a few minutes."

"Back to the Prince house?"

"Back to the Prince house."

"Should I take the replica necklace off first?"

"No. Lucy Prince is a very sharp woman. Now that she's had time to think, I'm sure she's worked out that since I had no reason to want to switch bodies with her, that medallion has to be a fake."


	6. Chapter 6

The Prince house was as impressive after dark as it had been during the day, it's features thrown into sharp relief by spotlights strategically sunk into the front lawn. Lucy Prince met them at the door and led them into the main parlour.

She was wearing a stylish cream silk dress set off by a simple string of pearls and matching pearl-cluster earrings. Her white pumps had three-inch heels, and her hair and make-up were immaculate. She looked, thought Mulder, utterly stunning. Scully noticed something else, a sort of glow she had about her. She had seen that glow in her own mirror before, and wished she saw it there more often. It was the glow a woman gets when she's having lots of great sex.

"Nice medallion," she said, lifting the replica worn by Scully, "but it doesn't really go with that suit."

"Blame Mulder. It was his idea."

"Is your husband here?" asked Mulder.

"No, he had to shoot off on another book signing tour. I'll be joining him tomorrow. I always used to beg off his tours, but these days Greg and I can't bear to be apart."

They sat down in deep leather armchair surrounding a low coffee table, and she poured them all coffees from an elegant cafetiere.

"So what can I do for you, agents?" she asked, smiling at them over her coffee cup, looking totally relaxed and self-assured.

"I've been thinking about your husband's suggestion for turning the recent strange happenings into a novel," said Mulder, "and I've had a few ideas for one of my own, which I'd like to run by you."

"Go ahead," she laughed, instantly grasping and agreeing to the little game they would be playing.

"Well first off I think I'd ditch that idea of it all being down to a Native American spirit, which just doesn't work for me. I think instead I'd go for a magical medallion, not unlike the one Agent Scully is wearing. And, of course, I'd set everything in a pretty coastal town bearing more than a passing resemblance to Conner Cove."

"Sounds good so far," she agreed.

"It does, doesn't it? OK, now lets assume things unfold pretty much as they did here in Conner Cove and fast forward to where the local sheriff, who I think should be the hero of the piece, decides to search for evidence on the shore. Let's say he gets lucky, despite having only a flashlight to search with, and finds the medallion in question. Being a lawman of many years standing, he knows better than to contaminate evidence and so picks it up by sliding his pen through the chain and drops it into an evidence envelope. This is the correct procedure to follow, wouldn't you agree?"

"I'm not a lawman, but it certainly sounds very professional. I like this sheriff."

"So do I. Only the next day he suffers an inexplicable lapse, however. For whatever reason, in his office, he removes the medallion from the envelope and his hand accidentally comes into contact with both the medallion itself and the hairs caught in the chain, hairs belonging to one of the three doppelgangers already encountered in the novel by this point. He feels something, maybe a sharp shock or possibly just a slight tingling, but thinks nothing of this at first. A few minutes later he needs to relieve himself, so he slips out back to the john, leaving the medallion on his desk.

It's in the john he first notices his body is changing. Transfixed he watches the transformation unfold in the mirror, utterly oblivious to anything else and not even hearing his deputy call out his name when he arrives at the office. The sheriff gradually gets younger, shedding thirty five years as his body gets smaller, his waist shrinks, his shoulders narrow, his hips broaden, and breasts grow from his chest. The features of the aging lawman are replaced by those of a more angelic cast, framed by a full head of long, blonde hair. Within maybe half an hour, the sheriff has become a beautiful young woman, and a dead-ringer for the other doppelgangers. How am I doing?"

"You have a vivid imagination, Agent Mulder, but surely your sheriff would be freaked out by this sudden transformation?"

"Anyone would, just by the sheer fact of it, at least at first. But as it progresses, he's delighted by the change, firstly because he was dying of cancer and only had months to live - sorry, I forgot to mention that about him - and he's now young and healthy again, and secondly because this is something he'd secretly wanted to happen to him all his life, his most fervent wish made flesh."

"All his life?" said Lucy Prince, licking her lips and looking uncomfortable, "Why wouldn't he have done something about it before this if that was how he felt?"

"There you have me," said Mulder. "Unlike your husband, I'm not a writer. Character motivation isn't something I'm good at. What would you suggest as a reason for him to have repressed that side of himself?"

Lucy Prince sipped her coffee nervously, then stared off into the middle distance.

"Perhaps..." she began, "perhaps your sheriff might have come to the town from a large city; Boston, let's say. Let's also say he was an only child whose mother died giving birth to him, that he came from a long line of Boston cops, and that his father was a martinet who wanted nothing more than for his only son to follow in their family's long tradition. Let's further suppose that the son was a sensitive boy who'd known from an early age he should have been born a girl, but who knew equally well that this was something he didn't ever dare tell his father.

Let's assume that at some point the father finds out about his son's...proclivities. Being the sort of man he was, a huge row would have ensued and he would've trashed the women's clothes he'd found hidden in his son's room, forbidding him ever to have anything to do with such stuff again. The son, of course, would continue to dress in secret as he always had. A few years later, when the son was twenty-one, the father dies. On his deathbed, he makes the son swear to put all his dreams of womanhood behind him and to become a cop. It's a terrible thing to ask, but the son, grief-stricken at losing the only parent he's ever known, promises he will. Ten years later, he becomes the sheriff of your fictional town. And he keeps his promise to his father. In all respects."

She looked up then, staring Mulder straight in the eyes.

"Does that sound like workable character motivation, or does it make your sheriff sound pathetic for keeping a promise that should never have been asked or agreed to, to a man who died forty years ago?"

Scully gently placed her hand over the other woman's and gave it a little squeeze.

"No, not pathetic," she said, "just human."

She looked at Scully gratefully, and gave her a small smile.

"So when the sheriff gets back to her desk," said Mulder, "and sees the medallion is gone, she realizes there's no way back, even if she wanted it. She's almost certainly going to be a woman for the rest of her life. She considers her promise to her father now fully discharged. She'd come within three months of dying for that promise. Now, miraculously, she not only has her life back, but it's the life she always wanted. What do you think should happen next?"

"Well," said Lucy, "she's in an awkward position at that point, having become yet another double of the wife of the town's most famous son. It's the sort of coincidence that probably wouldn't happen in real life, but let's say that at that very point the husband arrives at the police station and, encountering yet another version of his wife, demands to know what's going on. Being in no position to do otherwise she tells him everything she knows, describing the operation of the medallion in detail. He's very, very sharp, and quickly deduces that the woman he'd thought was his wife these past few weeks must've been an imposter, and that the body she was caught digging up was the body of his real wife. He asks the sheriff what she intends to do next, and the sheriff doesn't know. She's a dead ringer for a dead woman and has no idea where she goes from there.

The husband decides she should come back to his house with him, where there are clothes which will fit her, and that she should hide out with him until they figure out what to do. Back at his house, over drinks, they spend hours talking and discover just how comfortable they are with each other. One thing leads to another, and a kiss that takes them both by surprise turns into so much more. Afterwards, lying in bed together, it's obvious to both of them they're in love, almost as if was fate that brought this about. It seems crazy that they should have so completely fallen for each other in so short a time, but neither has the slightest doubt that what they're feeling is the real thing. The husband had been seeing the face of his soulmate in his dreams for years and now knew that finally, at the third try, this was she.

After that it's all just a matter of planning. They decide that she will always have been the real wife, of course, and that for the past several weeks she was held captive in the attic by the evil double incarcerated for digging up the body of the original wife. Having made that decision, they call the sheriff's deputy up to the house to report the captivity and establish her as the real wife. They also realize they need an explanation for the disappearance of the sheriff, but that takes a bit more planning.

They spend the next day working out all the details ...and doing, um, other things. During the day, the former housekeeper, who'd been fired by the evil double for fear she'd be found out, comes up to the house hoping to get her job back. The husband, realizing she could just as easily rumble the sheriff, refuses to have her back. He tells the sheriff about this later.

The following day, before anyone much is up and about, he drives the sheriff down to her office, leaving her there while he plants her sheriff's uniform on the shore. While he's doing this, she types a suicide note on the computer. Feeling guilty about the housekeeper, she decides to leave her all her meagre savings. When the husband returns from planting the uniform, they make a final stop at the sheriff's apartment.

The sheriff had a number of quirks, one of which was keeping her money at home rather than in a bank. Now she's a woman, this is one of many things about herself she resolves to change. Before leaving, she takes one last look at the place, saying goodbye and knowing she'll never see it again. She won't miss it. Then they go back to the husband's house, to start their life together as man and wife.

Think that works, or is it too fanciful?"

"No, I think that works just fine," said Mulder. "So what do you think the ending should be?"

"Why, 'they lived happily ever after', of course."

"I can live with that," said Mulder.

He turned to his partner.

"I think that's it, Agent Scully. We're done here."

Their investigation having concluded, they got up to leave. At the door, Mulder turned and offered Lucy Prince his hand. She took it, and they shook.

"It was a real pleasure meeting you...sheriff."

"And it was a real pleasure meeting you, Mr Mulder."

She gave them a dazzling smile then, on impulse, leaned forward and kissed Mulder on the cheek.

"When did you realize Mrs Prince was the sheriff, Mulder?" asked Scully, as they headed for the car.

"The first time we met her. Her reaction to the replica confirmed we were dealing with the Medallion of Zulo, and given she was 'freed' from the attic so soon after the sheriff disappeared, he seemed the most likely suspect. Of course, given how quickly she got comfortable with being a woman, and how close she and Greg Prince were so soon after the transformation, I also figured it was a reasonable bet the sheriff had been gender dysphoric."

Back in the car, Mulder said:

"I guess that's it. We can head back to DC now. Wake me when we reach Baltimore."

"What do you mean, 'that's it'? Aren't you forgetting something?"

"No, I don't believe so."

"The naked Lucy Prince who washed up on the shore, Mulder, who was she?"

"You mean, you haven't worked it out yet?" he grinned. He could be totally exasperating at times.

"Are you going to tell me, or am going to have to beat it out of you?"

He laughed, then reached into his pocket and handed her the brochure he'd picked up when they arrived in Conner Cove early that morning. She stared at it in puzzlement, then her eyes went wide.

"No way, Mulder, there's no way it could be him."

"Why not? He's the obvious candidate, and we've seen the townsfolk fretting over why he hasn't arrived yet. We've been told how Frank Jensen loved to charge around the cove in Greg Prince's powerboat, and I doubt that changed when she became the second Lucy Prince. She obviously kept the medallion with her at all times and either threw it overboard or had it fly off. Given the hairs trapped in the chain and what we know of Frank Jensen, I'm guessing the latter. She probably thought it was gone for good, and resigned herself to remaining Lucy Prince forever. With the prospect of all those millions in front of her, I'm sure this didn't seem too big a cross to bear.

She couldn't have known that Billy the dolphin had finally arrived in the cove, that he would have swum over to investigate this shiny thing dropping through the water. I imagine he nuzzled the medallion, coming into contact with those hairs at the same time. After that it was just a matter of time. Transforming into a copy of Lucy Prince, he was unable to swim in that form and drowned. And when that body washed ashore it set in motion the whole chain of events that led to Frank Jensen being incarcerated and Dan Turton achieving his heart's desire. Jensen probably thought she'd committed the perfect crime, but she was brought down by the natural, playful inquisitiveness of that poor dolphin."

"You do realize we don't have a shred of hard evidence to back up a single one of our suppositions, however much you think they fit the facts. And we're not going to be able to claim this was all down to some magic medallion without being able to produce the medallion itself. So just what are we going to put in our report?"

"We'll think of something," said Mulder, "We always do."

""""""""""""""

_Medallion of Zulo created by Jennifer Adams._

_I wrote this back in 2003. It's appeared elsewhere on the web since then but this is its first time appearing here._


End file.
